This tutorial will guide you through a procedure of hardware reseting and inducing recovery mode on a Sansa Clip v2 model, following original firmware restoration process inside Linux. This procedure is very similar to repairing Sansa Clip v1 and Sansa Clip+ but slight differences may exist for which the author of this tutorial has no knowledge of, so do not try this before you consult someone else with more knowledge and experience for those particular models.

WARNING: Before you decide to install Rockbox on your Sandisk Sansa Clip v2, read other people's experiences. Restrain yourself from impatience and hurry. Original Firmware Sansa is still better than a bricked one.

WARNING: The steps presented here are a "last resort" repair guide (beside JTAG magic). Be patient and wait for several days, even weeks, before you make a final decision to open your Sansa Clip v2 and repair it this way. Learn from my mistake.

If you lack any of this required skills, DO NOT engage in repairing process - instead pass it to a skilled electronic engineer or repair person and print this tutorial for him! Chances are you will mechanically damage your player or unintentionally cut tiny battery wires, effectivly rendering your player beyond easy repair. DO NOT short-circuit the battery! This may damage charging-control circuit resting on battery's body. Wires are very near each other, pay close attention to black and red wire. When you un-solder black (ground) wire, be carefull that it does not touch red wire by accidental move.

NOTICE: This tutorial assumes you are running Windows Operating System and you have Sandisk Sansa Clip v2 1GB model. This is important because all units (Megabytes) and values are a reference to it. If you have 2GB/4GB/8GB model values should be higher -- this is only my logical guess! If you are running Linux already, some steps obviously do not apply (like booting up into Linux).

20 Download latest Original Firmware ("*OF*" in further text) image ("*clip02.01.35.zip*", when unzipped becomes "*m30pa.bin*") from here http://daniel.haxx.se/sansa/amsfw.html and put it in a root of your C:\ drive under Windows

30 Open your Sansa Clip with a surgical knife or plastic pry tool (pry tool is preffered, but skilled persons can gently use sharp metal knife or "scalpel"). Follow this video tutorial by IRISH0627 on YouTube?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LRyDOxbdCI . Good news: you do not need to dissasamble entire device - only "first layer".

Soldering Advice: do it quickly, do not overheat nearby circuits. Also, when soldering black wire back (after flashing firmware) do not try to be machine-precise! Solder it as quickly as possible and as good as possible! The more you fiddle with this tiny wires the greater the chance is to accidentally push battery on a side and physicaly damage the wires! Stay calm and confident with your work.

[size=7pt]* There is no danger in doing that, as it proved in my case, but there is no point in doing it either. Use Quick Format and FAT32 if you must feed your curiousity, you will effectively turn your MP3 player into a Flash Disk drive with 980* MB of space. Now, you copy some files on it as a test... (I did! I did! And then again run Rockobox wizzard and installed Rockbox again with "all good" message in the tool at the end, but Sansa was still black afterwards with no success obviously - luckily, my old songs were still intact -- can you imagine a crazy amount of luck I had? Plausable explanation: NAND chips contain wear-leveling controllers with a single task to spread memory cells usage even onto entire chip, so this is probably the only reason why my songs and .rockbox files survived! So, when you format it, and your curiosity is behind, now you need to "unformat it" again and restore it in an unallocated state as before by deleting entire partition. Windows will not allow you to do that, so boot Mini Linux from Hiren's Boot CD, start GPartition and delete it from there. Probably, there is a GPartition inside Ubuntu, I leave that part for you to discover -- or just do not format it and skip this entire adventure as best :)[/size]

100 Gently short the unsoldered battery wire to correct PCB joint (with metallic object such as small screw-driver) and push the Power-On switch to see if the procedure was succesfull. Be shure you are making firm and uninterupted contact with the Battery all the time. LED & LCD should be activated and all your songs (if you copied any), folders and files should be there intact. Turn-Off player.

Assuming Sansa Clip v2 is still connected as unrecognised/unallocated USB drive and you just rebooted into Linux:

601 After Ubuntu Linux Live CD distribution boots up, you will see regular desktop with a ribbon and common tasks and programs like Firefox. Run Firefox and connect to Rockbox IRC channel if you need assitance from good people here.

602 Click on a Dashboard > Search, then type "Terminal". Click on "Terminal" icon to run it.

#The next step is optional, but since you are here, open another instance of Terminal (right click with your mouse over the old instance and click Terminal, or, again start Dashboard > Search > Terminal). In this new Terminal window type Funman's script for real-time monitoring of USB devices:

603 sudo su -c "while : ;do dmesg -c;read -t 1 && clear;done"

#The next idea is to find out "where" is our USB player connected, what "drive letter" equivalent it has (sda, sdb, sdc, sde etc.) so we can confidently run dd-command and restore OF to the right target. You do not want to restore firmware on your Windows C:\ drive by accident! Also, another idea is to "mount" our C:\ partition so Linux can access m30pa.bin OF file via dd-command. This procedure is tricky part currently not documented in SansaAMSunbrick? wiki page and that was a point of confusion for me. Thanks to good people over at IRC channel, I succedeed in "dd-ing" my Sansa player.

# as you can see, I have a 40 GB hard-disk drive (SATA interface, system drive) with 2 partitions (sda1=7GB and sda2/sda5=33GB) and "1027 MB" Sansa Clip which "does not contain valid partition table" (remember that unallocated space?). Important thing here for a dd-command is to notice "/dev/sdb" path. That is the address of my player. Also, remember that I have put "m30pa.bin" Original Firmware file at the root of my C:\ drive in Windows (1st partition).

# The next part I do not understand entirely, since I am Linux newbie, but I think this procedure will create a temporary folder on which we will "mount" our "C:\" partition so Linux can access it via dd-command. [someone correct me if I am wrong] (thanks to bluebrother & AlexP?!)

I wish to thank following people from IRC and forums: Saint, saratoga, gevaerts [initial Linux support and help with finding Terminal and commands], AlexP? and especially bluebrother for guiding me through "dd" command process! BIG THANKS! I own them that "bear".